Broken Britain

Even from across the Atlantic I've been over-exposed to the phrase, "Broken Britain". It's one of those easy, drab uses of alliteration that seems to please the editors of popular British newspapers. Paradoxically, it's precisely those newspapers who pump this kind of ideology into popular thought that causes Britain to break. When I returned home in mid-March I was, once again, subject to the powers of jet lag and forced, in my reasonably priced Yorkshire hotel, to turn on BBC News 24 at 3am and watch until dawn. I have never before been so depressed. Not because of the overbearing, chaotic, and worrisome state of the international stage, but because of the BBC's news cycle. The salad of stories that they covered, in depth, was an atrocity. Before I remind you that the BBC is more or less wholly paid for by the British public, the real tragedy is that this type of news reporting is being carried out so nonchalantly and so wholesale that the British public don't see the gradual bankrupting of their news media. BBC News covered the timely death of Jade Goody, the unfortunate death of Natasha Richardson, and the discovery of a mother and daughter corpse duo. Three items, covered in detail by the British Broadcasting Corporation. This came in the same week as President Obama's plea to Iran to discuss further its attempted nuclear proliferation, the March 14th demonstrations in Beirut that truly mark the beginning of the Lebanese general elections, and the breaking of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza, to name but a few. I hope that when I put it like that, you can see how redundant and absurd the BBC's selection was, how insignificant to your lives and mine, how unapologetically irresponsible. The three deaths were, of course, tragic, yet unworthy of a place among headlines and breaking news. This style of media distribution has become the norm in Britain, and it is not breaking news, it's breaking Britain.